Twilight City Stroll Tour

[I took a ton of photos of this tour. I'm not going to post them all here; just the best ones. If you'd like to see the rest of the photos I took, please see my whole photo album HERE.]

The Spanish Steps

When we finished our Colosseum tour, we had to immediately head to our next tour. We grabbed a snack along the way (there are food carts everywhere!) and began our trek across the city. Unfortunately, we were exhausted and disoriented. The streets aren't labeled very well in Rome (meaning that most of the time, there aren't any signs at all!). So, after wandering and hoping we were heading in the right direction for quite a while, we finally grabbed a taxi to the Spanish Steps.

People at the foot of the Spanish Steps.

We were actually very close. The ride was only a few minutes long. Anyway, we then walked all the way to the top of the steps to meet our tour guide. When you're exhausted, this isn't ideal. After a few minutes, we found our guide for the Twilight City Stroll tour and we were able to get started.

Trevi Fountain

After a brief history, we wandered on down to the Trevi Fountain.  Again, more history and, of course, we both threw in a few cents (it's said that putting a coin in the fountain will ensure your return to Rome -- and, I did it last time and managed to return just 3 years later!).  

Can you tell that we're both exhausted??

Anyway, we continued to wander around and the guide (I'm blanking on what her name was!  Sorry!) explained to us where we were and where other familiar places were from our location.  It was very helpful.  

There was so much to see!  We were all over the place.  We soon found ourselves at the Pantheon.  It was absolutely beautiful.  It's actually now a church.  Apparently, if you know the right people and have enough money, you can actually get married in the Pantheon.  How cool would that be?!

The Pantheon

Also, there is a hole in the top of it.  You can't really tell in the photos that I took, but the hole is enormous.  It allows light to enter the Pantheon.  However, it also allows rain in -- it rained briefly that day and there was actually a puddle on the marble floors while we were there.  There are several theories of how they were able to create the dome.  They know that the dome was done in one giant section instead of several sections.  It would have made it incredibly difficult to build and top the Pantheon!

The hole in the dome.  

After we finished at the Pantheon, we went to get gelato.  Gelato is Italian ice cream.  And, it's way better than American ice cream.  Philip ate it (usually) several times a day.  After our pit stop, we moved on to Piazza Navonna.  It's really beautiful at night.  

When we finished up there, the tour was complete.  Our guide told us a few good places to eat and how to get to them.  We picked the one closest to us and hoped for the best.  Unfortunately, it was probably one of the worst meals we had in Italy.  It wasn't very good and the service was terrible.  The name of the restaurant was Ciccia Bomba.  I'm not sure if we were just there on a bad night or what.  The food was bland at best and our waiter spent more time talking to the other waiters than helping us.  We literally had to get up and track him down after waiting for over half an hour and not seeing him at all.  

When we finally finished dinner, we were both dead on our feet, so we just took a taxi back to our hotel and pretty much just passed out!  We had yet another long day ahead of us, so we needed a good night's rest!